What’s the Imitation Game? Well, it’s a test, also known as the Turing’s test, which involves three entities, one of which is a man and one of which has to be a woman. Both man and woman are questioned via written notes by an interrogator who has to find out which one is the man and which one is the woman. To make things more interesting, the man’s role is to trick the interrogator into making the wrong decision, while the woman’s role is to aid him into the right one. Therefore, both answers will come out as feminine, except that one will be true and the other one will be a lie. Still, this wasn’t enough. Sexuality and humanity gets mixed together when the man pretending to be a woman gets to be impersonated by a machine pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.
Auch, my head is hurting.
Taking the metaphore one step further, the question this movie seems to be posing is this: was Alan Turing a man, a woman or a machine? The movie is about him, his genius and personality, his autism, his homosexuality. And yet it’s about none of those things. Though the methaphore about the Imitation Game never get explicit, even when it explains what an Imitation Game is, it seems that the real riddle is to find out the actual topic of the movie.
Based on 1983 biographic novel by Andrew Hodges, The Imitation Game is a beautiful movie, driven with extraordinary passion by Benedict Cumberbatch‘s intense and deeply felt performance. Still, it seems to be lacking focus and you might find yourself in a pickle: whether to like the war drama about the struggle to decode Enigma, the building of Ultra, with Mark Strong‘s extraordinary depiction of M, or to focus on the personal drama, torn between Keira Knightley‘s and Allen Leech‘s well balanced roles. Personally, I liked the way the movie chooses to develop the myster, both the one about how to crack Enigma’s code and the one about Turing’s background and personality. Still, maybe the movie would have beneficied from a more courageus choice of focus. Lots of good actors get sort of wasted around a plot that doesn’t come to its point. Even the initial pull, with Turing in the interrogation room that will lead to his doom, seems to be lacking its pull.
Still, I really think you can choose what to enjoy about this movie. My personal pick, aside from Cucumberbatch himself, is the encryption thriller, the way it’s developed, the midnight alarm narrative device, and its solution reminded me a little of A Beautiful Mind. For some reason, beer and flirting always leads to massive breakthroughs in the history of science. Beware you sociopathic nerds out there: you might be missing your chance to actually become a genius.
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